


Harsh

by Dorasolo



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst and Humor, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 04:09:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorasolo/pseuds/Dorasolo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Besides, it’s only another couple of days that she's gone. What could go wrong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harsh

**Author's Note:**

> This was part of the LJ community xf_santa gift exchange 2013.

Former Special Agent Fox Mulder, now just Fox Mulder, consultant, sulks on a Thursday morning, sipping lukewarm coffee at a nondescript diner somewhere on the Maryland outskirts of Washington, DC. A young blonde waitress stands at the ready, patiently waiting to refill the cup that he cradles in his hands. He grimaces, wishing that the coffee would warm his insides the way that he had hoped it would when he came to the diner to sulk. Not that he has any right to sulk, but Mulder knows that he is nothing but excellent at pouting.

Mulder is sulking because Dana Scully is in Chicago for a week teaching a lecture series to young, bright, new forensic pathologists. She was more excited about being asked to teach than the actual teaching; flattery had gone a long way in creating her all-consuming, and quite frankly, abnormal amount of joy at teaching people who on a normal day she’d barely trust to do a straight incision.

But that is his Scully, his former partner, his current girlfriend - but really, what are titles but abstract constructs that cannot come near to describing what a person’s true worth is to another person at any given time? Mulder winces, remembering when he had introduced Scully to a client who had hired him to do a profile as ‘his girlfriend’ and her eyebrows quirked so high that he thought they had escaped her face. Scully hates the word “girlfriend” and feels that the word “partner” explains their relationship better than anything else.

At the time, however, Mulder had unfortunately quipped that partner now means “having sex-with-socks-on,” and he had had an elbow sized bruise on his ribs for a week.

While she is now a lead forensic pathologist at the FBI, he is still working as a FBI consultant. It is the same work he had done before he was allowed to be a living human on paper. This time, it is without an alias and he is allowed to go into the FBI building without an escort most of the time. His work is sporadic at best unless there is a serial killer, a mass murderer, or what used to be classified as an X-File, and the case happened to be accidentally-on-purpose tossed his way.

A case had fallen upon his desk the day before he was supposed to leave with Scully to go to Chicago. It was an urgent matter, a profile of a mass shooter, a real what-the-fuck that had put the Bureau’s best and brightest ingenues into a tailspin trying to profile the killer. The shooting took place at a ballet school, but the killer had worn a mask and had so far eluded capture by DC’s finest.

As a result of being assigned this case, Mulder is literally grounded until there is a suspect in custody for interrogation; Skinner had forbid him to go with Scully to Chicago. Scully had been apprehensive about Mulder taking the case at all because she felt that it was too heavy for him to handle alone as his first case back among the living.

She is probably right; it has the urgency, the intrigue, and the darkness of a Luther Lee Boggs, a Robert Patrick Modell, a John Lee Roche. It is exactly the type of case that causes Scully to worry the most, the type of case that the old Mulder would run off impulsively to do something dangerous or ridiculous without telling a soul what he was planning to do.

Mulder hits speed dial one on his cell phone, frustrated and lonely, and Scully answers on the second ring, relieved and pleased to hear from him.

“I miss you too, Mulder,” she says by way of greeting, quietly, straightforward as she always is.

“I wanted to catch you before your lecture on slicing and dicing.”

“Good timing, because they haven’t started yet for today,” Scully answers, and he can hear a smile in her voice, even if he cannot see one on her face, “It’s not even seven AM here. Are you at the diner already?.”

“How do you know I’m at the diner?” Mulder looks suspiciously around the diner, which is mostly empty save for himself and the young waitress hovering with a coffee pot.

The answer is simple, and she gives it to him without preamble. “Because I know you. Because I know that when you picked up that profiling case, you gave up on sleep until it’s over. And it’s not over, is it?”

At Mulder’s silence, indicating no, it’s not over, she keeps talking, “and because I know that you hate the Keurig at the office, so you won’t go into the office before you have coffee, and you won’t stay home because you aren’t allowed to have a new coffee pot until you prove you won’t leave it on when you leave the house. Speaking of the house, have you burned it down?”

“Scully, ye of little faith,” Mulder scoffs, scratching a bit at his beard. He motions for the young waitress to fill his coffee cup again. “I’m fine. The house is standing. It’s a new house, meant to withstand even the strongest of Mulder storms. Didn’t the realtor tell you that when you asked? Besides, it’s only another couple of days that you’re gone. What could go wrong?”

In the Maryland diner, Mulder grimaces at his famous last words.

In the Washington hotel, so does Scully. “Whatever you say, Mulder.”

~*~

At half past four that afternoon, Mulder looks up from his desk, which is strewn with crumpled paper and a smattering of pencils that had failed to stick when he threw them at the ceiling. This case is frustrating, peppered with patterns too easy to miss but he is still missing something obvious. He stretches and scratches his belly like a cat. His fingers literally itch to pick up his phone and call Scully, but he resists the urge. After all, this is her career and she had waited long enough to do what she wants to do without his meddling.

Mulder hunches over his desk after adjusting his reading glasses with his palms spread on either side of the paperwork explosion on his desk. He is rusty at profiling this way, rusty at having steady work, and rusty at being part of a team. He is also just plain terrible at not having Scully as his partner. He remembers almost twenty years ago when they were separated and how they would still work together anyway, damn the rules. Mulder hits redial on his phone and feels a bit sheepish when Scully’s voicemail comes on immediately. Her phone must be off because she’s teaching, and here he is, being a nuisance. He guiltily hangs up without leaving a message.

Turning his attention back to the case, he narrows his eyes at the words on the page until they blur together into one giant mass of antagonizing print. What is he missing? He stands, throwing a pencil upwards. It doesn’t stick, and careens back to the floor with a small clatter. Mulder crawls to his hands and knees to pick it up and notices a small pile of paper that he must have knocked off his desk when he went to make a sandwich.

The papers belong to a set of school records from a family member of a child who once attended the ballet academy. Mulder skims over them for the next several minutes while sitting on the floor, searching for something, and he lets out a startled, unamused bark of laughter when he finds it. The young man’s younger sister died of cancer when she was eight, and this young man was reported to have his first psychotic episode shortly thereafter, claiming that an unknown dark force gave her cancer.

“Harsh,” Mulder mutters, and crawls out from underneath the desk. He puts the papers down on top of the haphazard pile. He earmarks the top sheet with a post-it flag. Mulder calls Skinner, and when his boss gets on the line, he shares what he believes is an accurate profile of Charles Robert Flanders, a Caucasian, twenty-four year old, upper middle class man living with his parents after several failed attempts to go to college. Flanders has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the past but Mulder believes it’s post-traumatic stress syndrome gone awry.

Skinner thanks him and Mulder hangs up, more than a little discomfited. He stares at the contact list on his phone, somewhat forlornly. It has six entries: Scully, Skinner, Doggett, Monica, Margaret, and Office. Scully put the numbers in his phone in case he might need them, even though he has certainly never called John Doggett unless told to explicitly by Scully. Out of all six of his contacts, Mulder believes that the best choice for an impromptu drinking partner might be Monica Reyes because she is kind, much like Scully’s sister Melissa was kind, and because she seems to like him much more than John Doggett does. He would ask Monica to meet him, but he cannot decide whether a phone call or a text message is the proper protocol in which to make the request.

~*~

In the end, Mulder wanders to a small neighborhood bar a few blocks away because they have a dart board and he wants to drink and throw projectile objects at something other than his ceiling. He does not leave any lights on in the house, and even unplugs the toaster that he used earlier, which he thinks will please Scully, because now there will not be a fire. His attention diverted by the case, missing Scully, and his conundrum about text messages versus a phone call, Mulder leaves his keys on the counter. He does not realize his keys are still at home as the door’s lock clicks into place, nor after two fingers of whiskey.

Or four.

Or six.

He forces himself to focus on his phone and is perplexed to realize he has sent Scully six texts, two of which demand she come home immediately, three of which just say ‘Scully!’ and one of which says ‘sorry about Queequeg!’ He has also sent Monica two texts, both of which demand that she come meet him at the bar. Mulder is not proud of himself for this text message fiasco and does not want to wait to see if Monica shows up at the bar. Instead, he leaves the bar and walks back home to his nice, quiet, modest sized house in his nice, quiet, modest sized neighborhood.

~*~

He ambles up to the door, fumbling in the pockets of his jacket. After patting his backside twice, Mulder realizes he does not have his keys.

Special Agent Monica Reyes, slightly concerned after receiving two text messages, two more text messages from Mulder than she has ever received in the past, arrives at the bar and does not see Mulder. She asks the bartender about a man that has mostly brown hair and a salt-and-pepper beard and he nods, says he thought he saw him head out, perhaps to another bar. Monica texts Mulder, “Where are you?”

Just in case, she texts Scully, “don’t worry, I’ll find him.” She also texts John Doggett, “I need to find Mulder.”

Doggett is at his desk doing paperwork, and he frowns at Monica’s text. He sends Monica a text in reply, “why are we looking for Mulder this time?” He thinks he should also ask Scully, and sends the exact same text to her. When no reply comes from Reyes or Scully after twenty minutes, he puts on his coat and heads out toward Mulder’s house. Doggett is practical; he figures that unless Mulder is dead in a ditch somewhere, he will have to return home.

Mulder decides that he should try to climb into the upstairs bedroom window by standing on the ledge of the wooden deck in the backyard. It is slippery after the rain they had, but he manages to get onto the ledge without any trouble. He takes a moment to congratulate himself for the climb, given that he is wearing shoes with no traction despite Scully’s repeated attempts to get him into some practical fall weather boots.

He stretches straight upwards and makes a few failed attempts at reaching the window pane, feeling a tweak in his lower back. The motion detector lights go on and Mulder squints in the suddenly blinding light. “Harsh,” he mutters.

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, he might have been able to get to that window without pulling out his back, but those days are long gone. Lamenting his newfound lack of athleticism, he puts his hand to his ailing back. His balance is altered by the alcohol. When he wobbles with the sudden movement, his phone falls out of his jacket pocket. Time moves in slow motion; seconds turn to minutes as his phone plummets and then loudly hits the deck. From his vantage point on the ledge, it is clear that the front screen has shattered.

More than a bit annoyed, Mulder stands on the ledge and tries to use the gutter to right his balance, and instead his life flashes before his eyes with twenty years worth of cross-armed, angry Scullies with various styles of red hair and flashing blue eyes. He is now flat on his back next to his phone. Scully is going to kill him.

He can see through the broken glass on his screen that he has text messages and missed calls from Scully and Reyes. Groaning because he cannot slide his finger on the shattered glass to respond to any of them, he tries to stand up. He sees flashing blue and red lights coming toward his house, and he is willing to wager the cost of a new phone that all of the people he knows probably think he is dead.

~*~

“Sir,” a disembodied woman’s voice says, “Sir. Are you hurt?”

“Just my pride,” Mulder jokes, weakly. He attempts to sit up and instead has to lie back down and fight the urge to curl up into the fetal position. “And my back. I think I’ve pulled it out.”

“We had a report of a burglar,” a second disembodied voice, a man this time, adds sternly while shining a light on his face. “May we ask what you’re doing back here?”

“I forgot my keys,” Mulder explains, blinking while his pupils dilate painfully in the light. He shields his eyes against the flashlight. “I went to the bar and I forgot my keys. I work for the FBI. This is my house; I live here with my partner.”

“And where is he this evening?”

“She,” Mulder corrects, thinking that this is one of the reasons why the word “partner” is so ambiguous as a descriptor of his relationship, “she is in Chicago.”

The male police officer asks for ID, which is luckily in Mulder’s wallet. At the ID badge that allows him into the FBI building, he nods and moves out of the way to let the EMT assess him, and just to be safe, they put him on a backboard and start moving him into the ambulance. “She’s going to kill me.”

~*~

Scully is on her way to the airport. Even though she’s slated to wrap up with her classes on Friday, she is too anxious about Mulder’s disappearance to concentrate on a goodbye speech. She is reminded of so many other times when Mulder disappeared; all of the times she found him in imminent danger, broken, mentally altered, or even worse, not finding him at all. The rational part of her knows that this is what she signed up for when she fell in love with Fox Mulder, but the irrational part of her is in an uproar, demanding to know why he never listens, why he always does this to himself, why he does this to _her_ , and what is it going to take to stop? It is an anxiety-riddled flight back to BWI from O’Hare; as usual, more than anything else, she wants him to be safe.

~*~

Mulder is in the ambulance when John Doggett pulls up in his government issued Taurus. “What the hell happened, Mulder?”

“Locked myself out when I had a drink,” Mulder explains, now embarrassed as the alcohol’s effects are subsiding. “Tried to climb in the window.”

“Why on God’s Green Earth would you think that’s a good idea, Mulder? I think Monica has a spare key.”

Mulder really hates how Doggett says “Mulder,” and is grateful when Monica Reyes arrives at his now overcrowded home.

“An ambulance? Oh Mulder,” she sighs, pity creeping into her voice, “Scully is going to _kill_ you.”

~*~

Scully turns on her phone as soon as the plane touches down on the tarmac. There are no messages from Mulder, but she reads a message from Doggett that they had found Mulder, and that she should meet them at the ER. Her heart pounds, but she reads a text from Monica that assures her that Mulder is fine, just mostly embarrassed.

She breathes a sigh of relief because Mulder is not seriously hurt, but the uneasy feelings do not totally disappear. Life with Mulder means she will always worry, and she wonders not for the first time if returning to life as they knew it was a good idea. But for now, she will pick him up from the hospital and take him home.  



End file.
